This book is an essential guide to some of the best free add-ons to PHP. These add-ons, or tools, provide invaluable functionality for improving your PHP web applications, including accessing databases, generating robust Web forms, using page templating systems, creating and parsing XML documents, authenticating users, and much more.

In response to the existing shortage of documentation about the tools, author David Sklar packs this book with details about installing, configuring, and using each tool—along with plenty of examples tailored to PHP 4 and 5.

Sklar also lays out the details of Auth and HTML_QuickFormtwo hard working PEAR modules, so you don't have to code your own authentication system or Web form construction set! Also included are chapters on debugging programs, and increasing Web server speed. In short, you will learn to eliminate inefficiencies in PHP, and enhance performance without any code modification.

David Sklar is an instructor at The New School University and an independent technology consultant. He is coauthor of the book PHP Cookbook and the author of the Learning PHP. David has spoken at many conferences, including the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, the EGovOS Open Source/Open Standards Conference, and the International PHP Conference. His consulting practice focuses on interactive Internet applications, distributed systems, scalability, and security. Additionally, David is a principal of the Transparency Project, a nonprofit organization that coordinates data markup standards and builds tools that analyze publicly available political and campaign finance information. David was a founder and the chief technology officer of both Student.Com and TVGrid.Com, where he led teams of PHP developers that built multilingual data-driven web applications. He holds a degree in computer science from Yale University.

"This book intends to simplify programming tasks through the use … . The intended audience is intermediate-to-advanced, although I believe it is also of great use to the uninitiated. The Introduction provides a solid introduction to the use of PEAR … . The section on databases is required reading for anyone wishing to … . The Smarty chapter is an excellent introduction into templating … . Especially enjoyable is the chapter on PEAR’s Mail_mime … . I particularly enjoyed the level of detail given … ." (Mitchell Pirtle, International PHP Magazine, Issue no. 4, 2004)